Blog Archives

Not so redonkulous? New words in English

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of orthography Holofernes in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lll/lll.5.1.html) While neologisms such as

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Posted in Etymology, Vocabulary

Making words mean what you want

‘[…] There’s glory for you!’ [Humpty Dumpty said.] ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’ ‘But “glory”

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Posted in Etymology, Grammar, Vocabulary

‘I before E except after C’ – techniques for remembering tricky spellings

It may have the olde-worlde ring of a quaint but questionable proverb, and has indeed been much maligned in recent years, but there’s more truth to this well-known rule than initially meets the eye (or E). Here, we take a

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Posted in Spelling, Vocabulary

The word ‘Brexit’ is factually incorrect

This is more of a geographical than lexical post, but relates to a mistake that is made by writers, journalists, politicians and myriad others on a daily basis: ‘UK’, ‘Britain’ and ‘the British Isles’ are not interchangeable. In the wake

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Posted in Etymology, Geography, Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary

Literally redefining the English language

English is one of the most dynamic and adaptable languages in the world. While near neighbours such as France have committees in place to approve new and changing facets of their language, English is effectively “open source”; it is possibly

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Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary